Interview: Men of Mono

In issue 78 of Linux Format, on the shelves now, we have an interview with Edd Dumbill and Niel Bornstein - two prominent Mono coders who've written a book on the open source .NET implementation. Here's a few of the questions we asked, along with their answers:

LXF: How did you guys get into Mono?

Edd Dumbill: I was hacking on the Gnome desktop project, and working pretty closely around the sort of things that Ximian people were doing anyway. I came to Mono because it made me much more productive in writing Gnome apps with the leap in productivity from C# over C.

So for me, it wasn't really the cross-platform thing, it was just that it was a nice environment to work in. I participated in a project that [Ximian and Mono co-founder] Nat Friedman was running called Dashboard, which had been on hold for a time and eventually morphed into a search tool called Beagle. But that's what got me into hacking on Mono.

Niel Bornstein: For myself, I'd come from Java to .NET on Windows, and was always interested in the possibilities of open source in that space. Ed came along and told me he wanted to write a book [on Mono], so I sort of picked it up. I came to Mono from the book as opposed to coming to the book from Mono.

LXF: What's the biggest improvement in switching to Mono from other programming languages?